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| Läkarkort tillhörande en kvinna från Piotrków Trybunalski som kom till Sverige den 26 juli 1945. Djupt deprimerad - hennes make och son har troligen "omkommit" i Buchenwald. I slutet av oktober finns en anteckning att Depressionen har lättat sedan hon har fått veta att hennes anhöriga finns vid liv.... |
On December 2nd 1945 Jews from Piotrków that were left after the big deportations to Treblinka death camp were assembled to be deported to camps in the West. Parents and the children were divided into two main groups. Women with daughters and men sons. They had to board different cattle wagons in the same train.
After some hours of travel, the train stopped and the train was divided into two trains; one in the direction of Buchenwald and one in the direction Ravensbrück.
Later when the evacuation from both Buchenwald and Ravensbrück started numerous families ended up in Bergen-Belsen. It was not a "family reunion" as the Bergen Belsen Camp was divided into several camps and sectors and the inmates were separated. So many of December-deportees from Piotrków and also their children were in Bergen-Belsen. However, the inmates of Buchenwald were evacuated also to other camps, among others Theresienstadt. Theresienstadt was a hybrid concentration camp and ghetto. Jews from the Buchenwald camp that was about to be liberated by the Allies early in April 1945 arrived to Theresienstadt after surviving death marches from camps. When they entered Theresienstadt, the Buchenwald was already liberated.
One of the families from Piotrków, Erlich were split, like many other on December 4th, 1944. The mother in the family was sent to Ravensbrück while the father and his 17 years old son ended in Buchenwald. However, they were later deported to Theresienstadt, 300 km east of Buchenwald.
The Red Cross took over the administration of the Theresienstadt and removed the SS flag on May 2nd, 1945, and on May 8, Red Army troops liberated the camp. On 11 May, Soviet medical units arrived to take charge of the ghetto; the next day, Jiří Vogel, a Czech Jewish communist, was appointed elder and served until the ghetto was dissolved. In Theresienstadt like in the camps liberated by the Allies, the authorities imposed a strict quarantine to contain the typhoid epidemic. More than 1,500 prisoners and 43 doctors and nurses died around the time of liberation.
Ehrlich's, son, and father survived the epidemic but had to remain in the camp. Erlich- mother was transported from the huts in the Bergen-Belsen camp to the hospital area. Like the main part of former inmates there she was sent to Sweden. It is likely that when she found other Piotrkow inmates from Buchenwald in Bergen-Belsen but not her husband and son she assumed they died in Buchenwald or during the death marches.
It is likely that it took 6 months before Erlich got the information that the rest of her little family survived.
http://faculty.ce.berkeley.edu/coby/essays/coalchild.htm
Sources
Dawidowicz, Lucy S. The War Against the Jews 1933-1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975.
Giladi, Ben, ed. A Tale of One City: Piotrkow Trybunalski. New York: Shengold Publishers in cooperation with the Piotrkow Trybunalski Relief Association in New York, 1991.
Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1985
